No wonder, Konami eventually picked up on the opportunity to turn gacha games into mobile games. The profit incentive in Japanese gaming is high. Their contents are surprisingly high quality and are aimed to be collector’s items so people will keep spending money in hopes to get the right item. There are whole stores with multiple stories all filled with gachapon machines. Which sounds like a cheap thing you’d find in a mall or at a street corner is a huge thing overseas. Those might me little toy figures, rubber balls or other toys. On the front of the machine is usually a sticker that lists the possible contents you can get when you toss in a coin to pull one of the capsules. The concept it is based on is gashapon, which got shortened to gacha eventually: little vending machines with capsule toys. Gacha games come, like so many things in gaming, from Japan.

They draw you in with the hopes you will spend money once you’re hooked on the game. But there’s also sites that allow playing with no-deposit bonus. Often, they need to deposit money to be allowed to take advantage of the bonus. Here, casinos usually offer a bonus that is supposed to draw in new users. We know these kinds of deals from online casinos. You don’t have to pay any attention to the loot box mechanic, or can use the free pulls the game offers from time to time. Typically, the gacha games are free to play. Often there are multiple quality levels of the item or character you want to own, like gold or bronze star versions. Generally, the items come in boxes with differing probabilities of containing the loot a player would want. In the aforementioned games, it’s characters you can then use to fight. A gacha game is a gacha, as soon as it has a loot box mechanic that lets you collect… well, something. Theoretically, gacha games can be all kinds of genres or game mechanics. What’s the deal with gacha games? What are Gacha Games? That is a damning criticism, considering many of them a free to playre specifically aimed at children and teens, with games like Fire Emblem Heroes or Genshin Impact. Some say they are akin to gambling mechanics and should be banned. We’ve been living with the trend to put loot boxes and pay-to-win mechanics into video games - mostly from Japan - for a while now, and the critique has been high.

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